Fighting to Protect University Mental Health/Counselling Services

Image: students at a student support centre. Picture by University of Nottingham, Creative Commons, flickr.

I have an article up at the PhDisabled blog, about the media debate currently going over student mental health services in the UK and how they are overstretched and underfunded.

Disabled PhD students are dealing with a lot at the moment. Apart from the ongoing academic disablism that we always face (see the #academicableism feed for many, many examples), there are specific situations dragging us down during this age of austerity. Student Finance England is finding ways to delay and turn down students’ applications for Disabled Students’ Allowance. (Anecdotal evidence includes my own fight to get it back – evidence of my disability that was always accepted in the past, has this year been refused. Talking to others, it seems that I’m absolutely not the only one.) Tuition fees are rising, which further excludes already-excluded disabled students, since disabled people are among the poorest people in society and are only getting poorer under the current government regime. And now there’s a crisis in the funding of mental health and counselling services based in universities.

The protection of our services at universities is a priority in these days of increasing exclusion – especially mental health/counselling services. Not all students with mental health problems would consider themselves disabled, but many would. As I say in the article, UCAS evidence suggests that increasing numbers of people with long-term mental health problems are applying to university in recent years. Meanwhile, non-disabled and disabled students alike deal with the mental health difficulties that can arise from stress at university. And disabled students face a whole lot of stress.

That’s why I’m arguing here that we need to talk about mental health services at universities and how they are under-funded. Unlike some university representatives, who apparently would rather we didn’t.